I’m not normally interested in drugs, especially hallucinogenics. I’ve never done any and the wreckage they’ve caused since the 1960s has turned me against them.

But this documentary was all about a scientific study of the substance called DMT.

It’s naturally present in nature and not synthesized as LSD is.

What impressed me was the character of the researcher as the documentary develops.

This was serious study led by someone who was left with more questions than answers and was troubled by the nature of the study itself.

Graham Hancock, who I am not a fan of, even said something that set off an alarm bell in me:

Our society values alert problem-solving consciousness. And it devalues all other states of consciousness. Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today. Of course, we accept drunkeness. We allow people some brief respite from the material grind. A society that subscribes to that model is a society that is going to condemn states of consciousness that have nothing to do with the alert problem-solving mentality. And if you go back to the 1960s when there was, you know, a tremendous upsurge of exploration of psychedelics, I would say that the huge backlash that followed that had to do with the fear on the part of the powers that be that if enough people went into those realms and those experiences the very fabric of the society we have today would be ripped apart and, most importantly, those in power at the top would not be in power at the top anymore.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Unfortunately, this important statement is undercut as imagery of the kind of unwashed hippie scum most people despised back then is played over it:

Over forty years later, I still want to scream: Die Hippie Scum!

This was an interesting relationship:

And there was also mathematician Ralph Abraham!

The entire documentary amped up my curiosity. So many of the things mentioned in it paralleled my own non-drug experiences and thoughts.

Words alone in a book can trigger the kind of imagery mentioned under the effect of DMT. I no longer have the book and don’t recall the title, but it was a science fiction novel about time travel and an image dramatized in the documentary was exactly that from the book:

Time zooming by as a series of discrete cards.

And this was right out of the novel and movie of Dune:

“Many machines on Ix… new machines.”

Strassman needs to do a follow-up study. I want to be in it. I want to be videotaped during it and I want to be asked a series of specific questions and be given a specific set of commands/suggestions during it. What was missing from his first study was guided purpose. He opened up the new land, but now it needs to be deliberately explored.

DMT is not lotus-eating. It’s rooting the human mind to see what The Truth is, the primordial math that creates everything that exists. Bound to be things in there to change society for the better. Go see the video.

How ever excited you are about it, it will exceed your expectations. 8)

Two things though.

1) You say words alone in a book can trigger DMT-like experiences. That’s like a kid who plays Halo death matches all the time telling a Vietnam vet that he knows that war is hell. The kid doesn’t have a fucking clue what war is like.

2) Your idea about guided suggestions won’t work on the doses the subjects in the experiments took. They were drop kicked in the face by God, across a universe or two. Where you go on DMT is so profoundly removed from your physical experience that I can’t adequately convey how utterly futile “suggesting” or “guiding” would be. You’re like, gone, man, gone.

He’s right.. pay particular attention to the segment in the movie where the subjects discuss the blast-off, as well as the ‘set and setting’.

While I do think it’s beneficial to have a general understanding of the common experiences those before you have had while under the influence of DMT, any attempt to plan *your* first journey IS in fact futile, albeit cute :)

There is something going on in the pineal gland that will change the way human civilization considers itself. The question — and I think what has held us back from being able to explore it further — is: are we prepared to accept what we learn, if more-structured studies are performed, new fields are discovered, and old ideas that have shaped our culture are deprecated perhaps overnight.

“Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.”